Posts by hammarbtyp

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

RTF - Really Terrible Formatting

Cheers to ODF

I seem to remember the whole standards things was a bit more interesting than that.

The way i remember it was that MS tried to force the standard ratification through by putting ringers on the standards board, because basically the MS doc "standard" still had a lot of proprietary stuff in it which made it difficult for 3rd parties to write and parse.

However speaking to an XML expert at the time who was designing a large system to create a UK legislative website, the response was it was better than nothing, and a huge improvement over the binary only alternative.

However let us not forget that without the threat of ODF and the risk of major customers switching, MS would never of done this, so if nothing else we should thank ODF

Altman's eyeball-scanning biometric blockchain orbs officially come to America

Re: "Minority Report"

This is the problem with America. They watch a film about a dystopian future and rather than accept it as a warning, they say "yeah, lets have some of that".

Seriously you show a film about a zombie apocalypse and while the rest of the world says that is terrible, parts of the US use it as an excuse to stock up with military hardware

So many US series have a body count higher than a a entire countries mortuaries, and the population of a entire supposedly civilized country goes, "yes, that seems to be a sensible solution to our issues"

That's me with a fresh eyeball in my pocket

Homeland Security boss says CISA has gone off the rails, vows to set it right

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

Re: I remember...

Oblig. https://xkcd.com/865/

Canada OKs construction of first licensed teeny atomic reactor

Sure lets just build it and hope it works 1st time, I mean what's the worst that can happen

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

Re: a datacenter is a gigawatt

Close. Our CEO recently announced that the big incrrae in sales was due to gas turbines being bought to power AI centers...great huh....

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

One OS

One OS to rule them all,

One OS to find them,

One OS to bring them all,

and in the darkness bind them

Microsoft tells abandoned Publisher fans to just use Word and hope for the best

It's what I hate about office365.You pay a subscription so that ms can just hoist the same crappy functionality on to you. Once they have you hooked they have no incentive for improvement

Picture formatting has been terrible from day one in word you would if thought after all those billions in profit gained, someone might of got around to improve it, but apparently not

Value of nothing

Or..and I'm just throwing this out there....ms could just open source publisher to hand off maintenance.

Obviously ms sees no value in the product, so give it away. Of course they won't do that because open source is cancer (unless of course it's useful to you)

Eutelsat in talks with Euro leaders as they mull Starlink replacement in Ukraine

The more you tighten your grip, Trump, the more systems will slip through your fingers.

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

Schrodinger's TV

If you try and measure the brightness, you can't measure the position

SpaceX has an explanation for the Falcon 9 bits that hit Poland

A note out of the von Braun playbook

We aim for Mars, but sometimes we hit Poland

Huawei to bring massively expensive trifold smartphone to world market

That's a lot of folding...

Insurance giant finds claims rep that gives a damn (it's AI)

Sometimes its hard to tell the difference....

A recently how to deal with Amazon support to return a parcel.

The conversation went like this

"I want to return a parcel that was sent to me by mistake"

"We will send you a return label"

"I don't want to be responsible since if it gets lost i would be liable"

"Parcels do not get lost in the post"

"Yes they do"

"We can send a courier tomorrow to your house"

"No one will be in"

"Send it by post then"

"With insurance it will cost to much"

"You don't need insurance since parcels don't get lost in the post"

the loop went on like this for about 20 minutes. Now I am sure this was not AI, but I'm pretty sure it couldn't of done a worse job

Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities

I've been doing it wrong all these years

I had never thought about doing that. I always assumed that buffer overflows were a feature and not a bug. Now I know different, I will certainly remove them all. Thanks Feds.

Next, if you have any advice on how best to suck eggs....

Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

So Larry, what 1st attracted you to this massive spend on DB technology?

Mega city council's Oracle finance fix faces further delays

Re: again?

"What does re-implement mean?"

It means that Larry can start planning on buying that new Hawaiian island he's got his eye on

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

Re: There Is Signal......And Then There Is Noise!

The only problem with this solution is that it is built on an incredible scaffold of technology which is only one prop removal from coming tumbling down. All those methods require a huge industrial complex to build and maintain, and there is no guarantee how long it can be maintained.

If it does come tumbling down there is no backup solution

Fortunately we live in a time where we have sober politicians in charge who are making good long term decisions….

Re: Paper

True, but it has one advantage over every other media storage…we have existing proof that data will retain information over 1000s of years and can be retrieved. There is no electronic media method that can say the same

Actually it’s the other way around. Your kids don’t care because they have the chance to interact directly with you, it will be the grandchildren and those who follow who will want to know what you were like, who you were, etc and look for any info to give them a glimpse. After all you will be part of them, and the hope is always by understanding your origins you get an insight into yourself

Worth is in the eye of the beholder

True, problem is who sets the value. Those family images on your phone? Likely worthless to anyone outside your family, but in 50 years, priceless to your descendent

History is littered where obscure letters between unknowns now are sold for millions because of history reevaluating their importance

Problem is everything is now ephemeral, there is a deep irony that as a civilisation we create more content in a month than the rest of the history of civilisation, but in a 100 years historians will have less information on what we thought, how decisions were made, and the day to day life of ordinary people than the time before

This is how Elon's Department of Government Efficiency will work – overwriting the US Digital Service

Lets order a new set of pork barrels

i smell bacon sizzling

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

what is porn

Will art galleries be exempt? If so, I expect a lot of explicit sites to redefine themselves as art spaces

Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

Re: Can you please confirm?

Actually it was a bit more fun than that. Basically Boeing decided to try and remove a competitor by playing fast and loose with trade agreements and encouraged the Trump administration to put huge inport tariffs on Bombardiers new aircraft, which were competing with the some of the 737 models.

Rather than removing the aircraft, it forced them into the arms of Airbus so strengthened the line. From this we can learn 2 lessons

1. It would of been more productive for Boeing to make better products, rather than hide behind shady eco politics

2. The use of tariffs to control trade, often has unintended consequences which go against the original purpose of imposing them

Fortunately that lesson has been learned, and the US won't make that mistake again, right...right?

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

we won't get fooled again (but we are)

Does anyone remember when blockchain was going to solve everything?....well, here we go again....

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

Community Notes

"community notes system like the one on Elon Musk's X, which Kaplan said has worked well for that site"

It worked well for me. In fact I haven't seen a false fact on X for months. Even better I haven't seen X for months and I am so happier as a result.

Next stop facebook...

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Re: This was predicted - in El Reg - years ago.

"Governments deciding what technology they want to succeed is even worse. It distorts the process of innovation and industries fail, just look at the European and US car industries as consumers' desire to buy EVs to meet ZEV targets has failed to materialize."

Another from the Ann Rand school of economics. Lets just leave everything to capitalism and we'll be OK.

Problem with that is that industries outlook tends to be very short term, often not much further than the next profit statement, however something's like infrastructure takes decades to install and won't so any returns until completed. The 2nd issue is all those competing standards are inefficient. Separate EV charging networks, multiple phone masts, competing standards. It needs someone to bang the heads together and create national or global standard. Industries are not going to do this, because for them creating their own standard and maintaining the monopoly is in their best interests.

then their is the motivations. Generally industry it is about profit and shareholder value. If it cheaper to pollute than the cost of clean up, that is what they will do. There has to be someone looking out the larger best interest of society.

There is a balance between capitalism and government planning. Go to far either way and it is a problem, but the idea you can do without either is a fairy story libertarians and communists tell their kids at night

Contrary to some, traceroute is very real – I should know, I helped make it work

Great article. However in defence of ATM, it was designed to allow highly efficient hardware switching and therefore high throughput. It was designed around the limitations of the day, but as general purpose processors became more powerful and more of the stack could be done in software that need waned.

Saying that the TCP/IP protocol has a lot to be blamed for. The fixed header, poorly defined elements etc has meant over the years it has been abused that has led to a spaghetti of work arounds

That's me with the 3 volume ATM manual in the loft

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

I can actually think of a few applications for the monitor. Having a standalone monitor with a 5V power requirement is quite handy in labs where the weight of power requirements of a standard monitor is over the top

Not using the compute 5 module (plus lack of NVME support) seems a major mistake though, and makes this a minor upgrade rather than the major change it should be, so i will probably skip this variant

Cryptocurrency policy under Trump: Lots of promises, few concrete plans

Re: "strategic Bitcoin reserves"

It is not a question of how much money will be made, but like all pyramid schemes, who loses..

Yes some people will become insanely wealthy, but many more will lose there shirt. Bitcoins do not aid productivity, add economic value. They are nothing more than a cryptographic con

the orange one made most of his wealth by getting other people to take the risk, and then disappearing just before the birds came home to roost. Bitcoin seems just perfect for him

Swiss cheesed off as postal service used to spread malware

Re: Car parking meters

I could imagine a scenario where there is a QR code that is needed to download a car park app. Since car parking apps seem to proliferate faster than lemmings on Viagra, it is so hard (fnar, fnar) to keep up with them.

My phone is currently about 20 parking's apps which I have had to download over the years, and i have no idea of the provenance of any of them

Thanks, Linus. Torvalds patch improves Linux performance by 2.6%

UABP

The lesson to this story is :-

Use a better processor

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Re: Cheap

"So, any technology that had been superseded, no matter how well it fulfilled its role before a new method came along, is now a "white elephant"? You do know that is not the meaning of the phrase?"

The phrase is used for any technology that does not fulfill the potential that was expounded by the original inventor or developer.

While hovercraft technology is still widely used in niche applications such as search and rescue, its other applications such as mass transport were never really fully realized and now have largely been taken over by other technologies such as high speed catamarans, which carry more, at lower cost, and are far quieter, and can handle rough weather far better.

The promise was hovercrafts would supersede everything from ships to trains and cars, but it never became the mass transportation nirvana that was promised, and a lot of money invested in it, never showed a large profit to the companies that invested in it. Cool technology in its way, but sometimes people like to over look the challenges because it is new, rather than asking the right questions (e.g Ekranoplan)

Basically the hovercraft is the Segway of mass transportation

Re: damn shame

"£100+ billion at the white elephant of HS2, £50bn on Hinkley Point C, £9bn+ for a short tunnel under the Thames, £6bn for an out of date armoured personnel carrier that doesn't even work, £1.4bn on the failed Watchkeeper drones, etc etc."

These are capital projects, not investments in future technologies. They are totally different. The UK problem is the lack of long term investment strategies. The investment is short term, which means we are very good at piggy backing onto other blue sky R&D projects, since once committed, it is politically difficult to pull out, but domestic ones are always going to be in danger of falling to the latest whim of whichever government is in charge.

We need an investment fund that takes a long term view and is largely independent of treasury and other departmental in-fighting

Re: Cheap

"They acquired the jet engine and hovercraft IP in much the same way."

Well, there was this thing called a war, where the UK needed materials, men and equipment, and it seemed prudent to share information to get it

As for hovercraft, the principles were pretty clear, and in the long term turned out to be a white elephant

It is not so much as "giving" away technology, it is the lack of investment. The US has a much greater amount of private venture capital, while the UK depends on government hand outs which are the 1st to be chopped in economic hardship due to the lack of a long term strategic thing

UK gov report to propose special zones for datacenters, 'AI visas'

Questions, Questions

So many questions...

How do you define AI expertise, compared to just standard IT?

Are they going to put these people in special compounds to ensure they don't (shock/horror) "escape" into the general community?

Why not encourage overseas students graduating in AI to stay in the UK, rather than kicking them out when the student visa expire?

How do you encourage "top" talent to come to a country that treats dependents such as wife and children as 2nd class citizens?

From my 1st hand recruitment experience, ever since Brexit, it is virtually impossible to get any IT talent from mainline Europe. The barriers, culture and high costs of living, just makes it unattractive, when any European citizen can move to any existing EU country. Our only advantage is that English is a common language and therefore less of a barrier, but in AI we are competing with Silicon valley, so it does not help

Yes, we need to train UK engineers as well, but in a growth market we will always be competing with other places for talent (Also add that UK universities have a talent drain of themselves and the reduction in overseas student visa's means that many are close to bankruptcy)

No UK government ever wants to be honest that the problems are caused by some idea of our exceptionalism and that vote. It was explained at the time, but no one is willing to accept the consequences, so they try and do things like thuis, which will solve nothing, because no one is capable of admitting the real problem, because the readers of the mail/telegraph et al will have a hissy fit while as a country we spiral into a slow decline

Pentagon stumped by mystery drone swarm flying over Langley Air Force Base

Re: I'm not saying it was aliens...

Worse - Amazon Delivery

Your GBU deliveries have been placed behind the dustbins

Re: My collection

Nah, got it from Alibaba.com

Top-secret X-37B space plane ready for daring new orbital maneuver

Re: Thunderbird One

Until I see the Wallace inspired pilot transport mechanism, I will hold my judgement

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

1. there are going to be use cases for which something else is better.

These are going to be edge cases, but the vast majority already use USB-C. However there is no reason that the USB-C standard cannot evolve. Lets face it the things plugged in has changed vastly since the humble plug was invented

2. Once established its going to be hard to change.

Actually that's a good thing since re-inventing the wheel is a huge waste of resources

3. These days everything charges from USB adaptors anyway - at worst you need a new cable. Even Apple (the main reason for the EU law) products charge fine with the right cable AFAIK (at least visiting friends have been able to use my standard adaptors with the right cable).

This sounds like a good reason for the standard

4. Manufacturers have an incentive to use a standard charger as it means they can avoid including a charger with the product.

Again this is a good thing. I have myriad chargers in my house but only use one or two. The rest are just a waste in resources and landfill. Apple etc should be in the phone business not the charger business

Re: I have one problem with USB C

I use magsafe connectors, which have teh advantage of making it easier to connect my cable to my phone, and also pulls out if I trip on the cable

FBI created a cryptocurrency so it could watch it being abused

Re: “false promises of profits in the crypto markets”

The universe and the gullible are the only infinite resources, and we aren't 100% sure about the universe

Babbage boffin Ada Lovelace honored for computer science contributions

Maybe she only used binary...

AI to power the corporate Windows 11 refresh? Nobody's buying that

Well, yes and no.

In good light as long as the subject is close, a modern mobile phone will create images as good as a average DSLR. However as light levels fall or the subject needs to be zoomed into, te photos tend to fall apart

Certainly the computational photography of modern phones hide some of the deficiencies, but its not a panacea. Some of the issues are hidden by the fact that most people only view images on handheld devices are this can mask a lot of ills. I took a photo on my pixel phone recently and it looked fine, until I downloaded it on my PC, there the AI artifacts were writ large

Mobile phones are great tools, but if you want a camera which take take images in all conditions, can be extended by zoom lenses etc, and can be displayed at a reasonable size, a good camera is still a must

I disagree that MS never invented anything, however the pace of innovation is glacier

Just look at the other leg of MS cash cow. MS office.

A MS office license is hoisted onto virtually every machine, either in the rarer bought one, to the annoying Office 365 subscription. You would of thought with all that money coming in, a lot would be invested in improving the product

However if you look at Word, Powerpoint and Excel and compare them to their 95 ancestors, it's really hard to see the killer features that have been added. Yes they added (the annoying ribbon), but in terms of usability and functionality they are just th same

For example, compare the animation transitions in Powerpoint. No new ones added in 30 years. How about better formatting and management of pictures in word. Still as borked as ever.

While there has been a few new macros in Excel, generally it is the same beast, abused by many around the world

Problem is MS is still a monopoly. They really don't need to try hard to make billions, that is just what they tell there shareholders. Therefore when they do need to innovate, they find they just don't have the cultural weapons to do so

Despite Russia warnings, Western critical infrastructure remains unprepared

Re: They would not list...

I think people under estimate the challenge

Lets assume you have a Nuclear Power Station. This takes 5 to 8 years to construct. The software system was almost certainly in development for 5 years before that, so is already 13 years old before it even starts, and will probably stay active for 20 years.

So already you are running kit with all sort of vulnerabilities, which were not identified when the project started.

So why not rewrite it? Well the software is bespoke. It has been customised to the vagaries of that system, gone through a long commissioning period. Updates and patches will have to go through a long testing period. We are not talking a PC update here

Small patches and changes are low risk, but adding major changes especially cyber security additions will almost certainly mean restarting the commissioning from scratch

The best you can do is add layers around the edges so that external access is controlled. However you really require physical security, because a nation state actor would easily compromise a system is given physical access to it

Yes, cyber is very important, but things cannot change overnight, due to the nature of the beasts

Upgrading Linux with Rust looks like a new challenge. It's one of our oldest

When I was in my 20's, I learned Erlang

For about 5 years after that I was a Erlang Fanboy, telling everyone they should use it, and being rude to those that didn't

I am still a fan of Erlang, but 20 years on., my opinions are more nuanced

I understand that now the people who refused my advice, were not stupid or stuck in the mud. They had there own issues to deal with which basically involved getting the next release out. Probably they had there own fanboy moments and now knew better. They appreciated the arguments, but also understood the challenges, which as someone who was still relatively inexperienced didn't

Its like when your kids accuse you of the same thing you did to your parents.

Erlang is still going strong, but had to find its own niche. Rust is the same. There is always this search for the holy grail of languages which will do everything. Rust is just a long line of these.

If you stick around long enough, the world comes back to the same point. Unfortunately it also means the same mistakes keep being made

Google says replacing C/C++ in firmware with Rust is easy

Re: Embedded? Don't think so

However, I also think that no new project should use C or C++ anymore but use Rust instead.

Nice in theory, but generally it is rare to start projects from scratch. Most projects will be based on an existing code base

Secondly, even from scratch most code rely on the library eco-system to do a large amount of the heavy lifting. If you super safr RUST code is calling some legacy C library, have you really gained that much?

Finally, languages in projects die, because apart from the initial evangelist, there is no one to support it. Its all very well for a RUST fan-boi to create a prototype in RUST, but at some point they will need support to move it forward. That can be a problem if a language has not reached a critical mass.

I have no problem with RUST. Interesting language, but don't underestimate the inertia of development when trying something new